The Internet is a worldwide, publicly accessible network of interconnected computer networks that transmit data. The World Wide Web (the Web) is a collection of interconnected documents and other resources that are linked together by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). Transmitting information from the World Wide Web over the Internet is vastly popular in today's society.
A search engine may be used to help find information stored on the World Wide Web. The search engine allows a user to ask for content that meets specific criteria and retrieves a list of items that match those criteria. This list is often sorted with respect to some measure of relevance of the results to the search query.
The list of search results provided by a search engine may include URLs of web pages that match the criteria entered into the search engine. The higher a URL is placed on the list, the more likely a user is to select that particular URL. The location of a URL on the list is referred to as a “ranking.” The better “ranking” a URL possesses, the higher the URL is on the list.
Online merchants have web sites with a number of different web pages that include information relating to products that are for sale. For example, an online merchant may have a web page for a certain book that includes detailed information about the book (i.e., author's name, publication date, etc.) The ranking of a web page may be influenced by the content included within the URL assigned to that web page. For example, if a user enters the terms “Harry” and “Potter” into a search engine, URLs that include the words “Harry” and “Potter” will be ranked higher than URLs that do not include these words, all else being equal. As previously mentioned, higher ranked URLs are more likely to be accessed by a user than lower ranked URLs. In other words, a highly ranked URL may increase the revenue of an online merchant because of increased traffic to the highly ranked URL.
As such, benefits may be realized by systems and methods that generate descriptive URLs that reflect the content of a web page to which the URL is assigned. Descriptive URLs based on the web page content may improve the ranking awarded to the web page by a search engine.